High-performance Workforce

A new study to be published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes has found a very interesting thing about human nature: testosterone is not predictive of an individual’s status in a group. This seems sort of like a “duh” moment for some of you. However, frequently in the animal kingdom, testosterone is the driver of dominant behaviors that push a male into the alpha position. We now have evidence that human behavior is more complicated. (The reference is Zyphur, M. J., et al. Testosterone–status mismatch lowers collective efficacy in groups: Evidence from a slope-as-predictor multilevel structural equation model. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (2009), doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.05.004).

There is an even more interesting finding than the fact that testosterone isn’t related to status in humans. The authors found that the relationship between status and testosterone is related to the efficacy of groups. If testosterone and status are high, the group productivity is high. If testosterone is low and status is high, group productivity is low. It seems that dominant leaders drive their groups to high performance, whereas less dominant leaders cannot drive behavior of their group sufficiently to increase performance.

Based on more discussion in the paper, it seems likely that a combination of technical capability and expertise are required to attain status, and dominance is required to push the group forward. The ideal manager, based on this paper, would be a person well-versed in the content area of the managed employees and possessing high levels of testosterone to drive the group. The paper seems to be pointing towards the possibility of biologically-based screening tests for promotion to management, which is something I have never seen broached to date. It also points to the influence of the leader’s personality, which is determined in part by genetics. It also makes me wonder if there will be laws created about biologically-based tests for hiring, similar to genetic-based tests for insurance.